Legowelt explains to Future Music why he loves his Roland JV2080. Producer: Chris Barker Editor: Keir Doherty Videographer: Will Seelig Videographer: Keir Doherty
I love rack synths and analog sequencers! This is like my living room. Except I don't have a Jupiter 8. People will eventually appreciate how crazy the '90s rack synth arms race got. In 1989 E-Mu released the Proteus/1 with 32-voices and 16-part multitimbrality which really blew everything away, especially since it cost $995. Every composer/producer got one. Roland caught up about 1994 with the JV-1080. Then things got weird. The E-Mu Morpheus had 32 simultaneous 14-pole morphing filters - which is what made the crazy formant noise in Ginuwine's Pony. Then the Yamaha FS1R (1998) was like a Morpheus and a DX7. Then the Proteus 2000 (1999) had 128 voices and they actually added a 2nd MIDI interface to make it 32-part multitimbral. So the next year Roland released the XV-5080 and that added a 2nd MIDI interface, too! The thing that makes the E-Mu and Roland presets still sound good (although maybe recognizable) is that the E-Mus were full of all the pro sample libraries from the Emulator 3, and the Rolands were full of Spectrasonics sounds which was the guys who made the Zero G sample CDs. E-Mu was basically competing with Akai/Roland samplers (with a SCSI CD-ROM attached) using sample CDs that would have beat loops on them, so E-Mu started adding beats to the Orbit, etc. The thing that's really funny to see is the beats section on the XV-5050. Because Roland was competing with the Orbit and the Planet Phatt! Anyway these Rolands have 4 separate tones each with 2 LFOs and 3 separate AHDSR envelopes for pitch/filter/amp. And per-tone layered FX. And the XVs have 2 samples per tone. It's kinda easy to miss how powerful they are because people just use the presets. But there's apps like Patch Base and Midiquest, and I think Prodatum and the original Roland editors still work since it's just SysEx.
I find it interesting that he uses the "rompler" to bring in something different than the common analog synths of today (which all sound so similar?). First, I don't know which sound he was referring to, but it is SO indicative of how circular the musical universe is. Nice imaginative sounds from the JV though. Thanks for posting!
Just like the JV1080, very often these synths are described as cheesy or bread & butter synths. But as in many cases, people scroll through presets and have no clue about sound design. Well here is the proof. The JV10/2080 are very underrated synths that are able to produce some very nice, sometimes very bizzare and out of the world sounds.
This is a great rackmount synth ! Korg triton also had one rackmout....also very nice...but you have to use a keyboard controller + midi.....or hands on into itself
Niiiice, yeah it's getting harder to find super cheap old gear at pawn shops because alot of shops are catching on that old equipment is coming back in style
I agree to some extent, but this is 18bit dacs and some very special rom waveforms and patches that I haven't heard Roland will release as soft synth any time soon. Korg is much more into making their synths as plugins (M1, Wavestation)
The whole JV series has imo is keeper equiptment dhould you ever own one . Or even the JD990 if you want to step back a little further. Love unusual sound textures.
990 PCM waves are a little fuller. 1080 and beyond used a form of lossy compression on the waves. But the 990's resonance clips badly, something they fixed in the later units. The 990 is high price now, £800-900+, the 2080 about a third of that. I'm lucky I got my 990 well before this price rise.
Rompler my arse. You can start from scratch and can go in and manually set one to four sawtooths or whatever, maybe a sub, cutoff and res, reverb, filter env, amp env, keytrack etc And mostly per oscillator! The only 'rompler' aspect are the presets / patches.
For a digital synthesizer, you could play it to someone without telling them what it is, and they would swear it is an analog instrument. The filters have some sort of Mojo to them .. I think the Integra sounded a bit thin and glassy in comparison
He should get a Yamaha EX5, one of the best bang to buck synths as it has 5 synthesis engines. It has awm2, fdsp (notedependant dsp prosessor and physical modeling) , Analog modeling (2 voice version of the great An1x, virtual acoustic (from the VL1/7) and an inbuilt sampler.
LOL when you're surrounded by so many excellent analog greats I guess you get an itch for some digital programming from time to time. I want to hear what he can do with the Evolver though.
